Paris Basin

“ After passing a small island which reposed at the bottom of the saucer, the river swung from northwest to southwest, then turned back and forth upon itself thus forming a rude inverted letter S.
Far to the southeast, a tributary joined the larger stream. Low hills and pastures, sloping towards the valley through which the central river flowed; scattered shade-trees dotting the western [96] lowlands; scrub and brush adorning the eastern heights;—such was the Paris Basin, the Seine River winding through it and the Marne tributary flowing from the east. ”

“ A similar series of materials occur in Hampshire, separated from the former by the upraised edges of the subjacent strata, which, cropping out in like manner on the south, inclose them also in a basin-shaped area. The same arrangement prevails across the channel, where a suite of rocks referable to the same age lie within the chalks, and constitute the well-known Paris basin, whose remarkable remains were first brought to light from their tomb of ages in Montmartre by M. Brongniart and Cuvier, upward of thirty years ago. The Auvergne basins, in central France, are equally well characterized. ”

“ New rivers would then flow over these increased elevations, and the ultimate effect would be to raise that part of the continent of North America several hundred feet above its present level. Even the very place on which I stand was, according to Webster, once a vast basin, extending from the Nore to near Reading, but now filled up with vegetable and animal remains; and the illustrious Cuvier has discovered a similar basin round the site of Paris. ”

“ The alluvium of the Seine and its tributaries, like that of the Somme, contains no fragments of rocks brought from any other hydrographical basin; yet the shape of the land, or fall of the river, or the climate, or all these conditions, must have been very different when the grey alluvium in which the flint tools occur at Paris was formed. The great size of some of the blocks of granite, and the distance which they have travelled, imply a power in the river which it no longer possesses. ”

“ The water-mills on the Marne are always going, to supply Paris with flour, and the land around is productive. The dairymaids make a very delicious cheese, called fromage de Brie. Rattling through the tunnel of Armentière, we pass La Ferté-sans-Jouarre, celebrated for the best millstones in the world, cut out of a silicious rock known as Burr stone, forming the uppermost stratum of the fresh-water basin in which Paris is situated. ”

“ Stationary basins should never be used in the sick-room. The perfect system of house-drainage has yet to be invented, and the danger from leaky and defective traps is so great that the only safe way is to avoid them altogether. If you have such arrangements in the room which you propose to devote to your invalid, cork up the overflow holes—or, better, stop them with plaster-of-Paris—and fill the basin with water, which must be changed from time to time, or cover it entirely with a board. ”

“ In modern times we have undermined the natural defences of the Rive Gauche by bringing our railways to the center of the city, by our sewers and by the subways. When you are on a Seine river-boat, you can see all along the river how we have opened up the city to floods. Paris, honeycombed underground, fell an easy prey to the fury of the river. The very skill that added to the material comfort and well-being of the city made Paris vulnerable when the unexpected and unprecedented happened. ”

“ An upper course in a country of impervious rock means that the volume of water is not reduced by absorption, and the difficulties of the river are increased when it encounters the tertiary beds of the formation to which Paris gives its name. In this soft soil the Loire gathers up great quantities of detritus, which it deposits farther down, producing the sand-banks which cost the communities large sums to remove. ”

“ VESTY OF THE BASINS
I THE MEETIN'
Now is it to be rain or a storm of wind at the Basin?
I love that foam out on the sea; those boulders, black and wet along the shore, they are a rest to me; the clouds chase one another; in this dim north country the wind is cool and strong, though it is now midsummer; at sunset you shall see such color!
From a little, low, storm-beaten building comes the sound of a fog-horn. That is the gift of Melchias Tibbitts, deceased, to the Basin school-house. ”

“ The diversity of scenery in the Great Basin is increased by mountains of volcanic origin, including several modern craters, some of which hold lakes, and by lava-flows of recent date, and by great alluvial fans or detritus cones which stream out into the valleys from the mouths of gorges in the bordering mountains.
The Great Basin proper, with its rugged topography and arid climate, is not an agricultural region. Small portions of it, however, when water can be had for irrigation, have been transformed into fruitful farms and gardens which yield bountiful returns. ”

“ Because of this, there is a temptation for those who undertake such study and planning to assume that river basins have, or ought to have, human unity as well—unity in politics, economics, and culture—with a consequent "basin public" inclined to think in basin terms. Basin identity of this sort would facilitate conservation, development, and management. It would "make sense," and clearly enough a a great deal of sense needs to be made, and soon, if people are going to have any hope of balancing their use of resources against the inevitable continuing requirements of the long future. ”

“ Cloud, where the lantern rears its head, Paris is seen over an extent of flat and marshy ground, over which the Seine winds with as many evolutions and curvatures as a serpent. The fable of the sun and the wind contending which of them could first induce a traveller to quit his cloak, might be paralleled by one invented on the sinuosity of rivers in plain countries. Let nature oppose rocks and mountains, the river holds on its way by torrent and by cataract: arrived at a level country, it seems to amuse itself by delay. ”

“ Paris is built on a stratum strangely rebellious to the pick, the spade, the borer, and human manipulation. Nothing is more difficult to pierce and penetrate than this geological formation on which the marvellous historical formation called Paris is superposed. So soon as labor in any shape ventures into this layer of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. They are liquid clay, running springs, hard rocks, and that soft and deep mud which the special science calls "mustard." ”

“ At the door of the last-mentioned river, longer than the Seine by 31 miles, is laid much of the blame for the volume of the floods. Its source is in the Plateau de Langres not many miles to the north-east of the Seine. Rich pasture-lands broken with long lines of tall-stemmed trees and brown-roofed villages are typical of the scenery of the main river and its tributaries above Paris. The painter who loves to be in the midst of opulent nature is happy here. ”

“ Like the meek, the upper estuary inherits the earth, or at least that part of the Basin's earth that is washed downriver as silt. There are enough fine suspended sediment particles in the water of the metropolitan river to make it drably opaque most of the time, even during relatively dry spells, when heavy sand and gravel dredging helps to keep it stirred up. As the current loses force and washes back and forth with the tides, the particles settle out slowly into smothering, continually renewed blankets on the bottom, and over two centuries have accreted into great mudbanks and shoals. ”

“ In Nature we often find these basins with the equivalent of the sandy layer in the model just described rising hundreds of feet above the valley, so that the artesian well, so named from the village of Artois, near Paris, where the first opening of this nature was made, may yield a stream which will mount upward, especially where piped, to a great height. ”

“ Deposits in dry basins. On desert areas without outlet to the sea, as on the Great Basin of the United States and the deserts of central Asia, stream-swept waste accumulates indefinitely. The rivers of the surrounding mountains, fed by the rains and melting snows of these comparatively moist elevations, dry and soak away as they come down upon the arid plains. They are compelled to lay aside their entire load of waste eroded from the mountain valleys, in fans which grow to enormous size, reaching in some instances thousands of feet in thickness. ”

“ Turning now to the question of how lake basins are formed, we note a great variety in the conditions which may bring about their construction. The greatest agent, or at least that which operates in the construction of the largest basins, are the irregular movements of the earth, due to the mountain-building forces. Where this work goes on on a large scale, basin-shaped depressions are inevitably formed. If all those which have existed remained, the large part of the lands would be covered by them. ”

“ Every stream has its own water-shed system, and this system is the real boundary of its basin. If we trace this [148] basin to its very limits on the highlands, we may find, not a mile away, the beginnings of another river, which shall flow in just the contrary direction, as for example in the case of the Rhine and Rhone, the Volga and the Dwina. The sources of the Missouri and of the Columbia lie close together, not a quarter of an hour’s walk apart; yet the waters of one flow into the Atlantic, of the other into the Pacific, and their mouths are almost 2500 miles apart. ”

“ This is the case with the Tay, Forth, Tweed, Tyne, Humber and Thames, the Clyde and Severn being the most remarkable exceptions to this direction. The whole extent of country from which a river receives its supply of water, by brooks and rivulets, is termed its basin, because a region generally bounded by a rim of high lands, beyond which the waters are drained off into another channel. The basin of a superior river includes those of all its tributary streams. ”

“ Lawrence, the tide rises and falls nearly up to Montreal, a distance of about 800 miles from the general shore-line. Still farther north are Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay, which, although but imperfectly explored, seem to be an example not only of the drowning of a river-valley, but of the largest part of a river-basin. The geography of the arctic archipelago fringing the north shore of the continent also suggests that a strongly stream-cut plateau has there been deeply submerged. ”

“ Now suppose the water basins which hold the lakes to be over a thousand fathoms (six thousand feet) deep. We know they are not more than four hundred and twenty feet deep; but suppose them to be six thousand feet deep. The process of evaporation, after the St. Lawrence has gone dry, might go on until one or two thousand feet or more were lost from the surface, and we should then have another instance of the level of an island water-basin being far below the sea-level, as in the case of the Dead Sea; or it would become a rainless district, when the lakes themselves would go dry. ”

“ The change from the wide horizons of the solitary downs to the populous and highly-cultivated lowlands is like coming into another world.
From the military point of view, however, the important features of all this part of France are its roads and rivers, and most of all its rivers.
The three main waterways, the Oise, the Marne, and the Seine, converge as they approach Paris. ”

“ The most conspicuous topographic features of the better known portion of the Great Basin are long, narrow, and frequently sharp-crested ridges, with a gentle slope on one side and a steep escarpment on the other. The steeper side in a large number of instances is known to be the upraised side of a fault. Each of these basin ranges, as they are termed, may be considered as the upturned edge of a block of the earth's crust, in general from 60 to 100 or more miles long, and 10 to perhaps 20 miles wide. ”

“ At the utmost, the millions of buckets of water, forcibly taken from private reservoirs, half fill with a good deal of trouble the great central artificial basin in which the water, low and stagnant, is never sufficient in quantity or force to move the huge public wheel that replaces the small private wheels, doing the nation's work. ”

“ The imminent danger that threatened the Basin was not the danger from the ever-rising sea. Long before the waters could fill the old sea-bed, that mighty cataract, moving ever upstream, would pass the intake; and with the floor of the river lowered thus some fifty feet it would be impossible to take the water out for irrigation. The lands reclaimed by the pioneers would go back to desert years before they would be buried once more under the surface of the sea. ”

“ Forty wholly removable, regulating weirs were constructed in the Seine several years ago. When wholly closed up in summer, they maintain the required depth of water for steamboat navigation. When wholly open in floods, they cause no stoppage in the river surface. A remarkable barrage mobile has been in action for several years at a place called Port à l’Anglais, above Paris, and above the junction of the Seine and the Marne. When all is open there is not a ripple on the river flowing by. ”

“ In its wild and rugged setting, Granite Basin has, for the few who have the hardihood to find them, many beautiful glades and shady nooks, where the grass and wild flowers weave their lovely patterns for the earth floor, and tall pines spread their soft carpets of brown, while giant oaks and sycamores lift their cathedral arches to support the ceilings of green, and dark rock fountains set in banks of moss and fern hold water clear and cold. ”